dressed. @ Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

There's a prevalence of theatre in which identity and personal backstory are performed, interrogated and reclaimed on stage. The artist moves across art forms, creating a home-spun aesthetic where the crafting is the work, not the ‘beforework’.

dressed. surpasses so many examples of this ilk. To describe it as self-indulgent autobiography (as one of the performers does) would be to negate its intelligent interrogation of form. To describe it as self-aware would be to imply it's glib, and it's far from that. To describe it as onstage therapy would be to miss its aesthetics. Even to critique it is to prepare to be included in their next onstage roundup of what other critics have said ("We didn’t know what we wanted them to say", the performers admit – fair enough).

Made and performed by childhood friends Josie Dale-Jones, Lydia Higginson, Nobahar Mahdavi and Olivia Norris, Higginson is at the play's centre, and her friends attempt to process, fight with and talk about the traumatic evening when Higginson was sexually assaulted and stripped. dressed. opens with how they met: a children’s dance class. They re-enact a routine, now very aware of the amount of gyrating and hip thrusting their ten-year-old selves performed.

Higginson is painfully quiet through most of the performance: her friends struggle around her, frequently asking "Is this helping?!" This reaches a climax in the play's most surreal scene, where her friends don costumes Higginson has made and perform as macabre clowns, sultry singers or shit comedians at the Fringe.

What makes dressed. so powerful, and what has garnered it so many awards and further touring (rightly so), is how unique and honest it is. At no point do we lose sight of the history of these four close friends, and at no point do we forget how one event changed their lives irrevocably. At no point do we forget that they’re aware of how muddled this is, of how fraught it is to put this experience into a show. Whether this review is the reading they want, and whether Higginson's experience will either be buoyed up by or drowned within the #MeToo movement is complicated and uncertain. But dressed. is undeniable in its potency. Everyone should see it.

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dressed. @ Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, run ended, more info